July, 2019

• 7 July

  US envoy on North Korea heads to Europe for denuclearisation talks

  

  Bloomberg The top US diplomat on North Korea heads to Europe for talks on removing nuclear weapons from the Asian peninsula, the State Department said, a week after an impromptu meeting between Donald Trump and the North’s Kim Jongun. US Special Representative Stephen Biegun will be in Brussels and then Berlin through Thursday to meet Lee Do-hoon, South Korea’s special ...

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• 7 July

  ‘Labour must speed up backing UK staying in EU’

  

  Bloomberg Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn should move more quickly to make remaining in the European Union the party’s official position before a possible general election, Labour’s treasury spokesman John McDonnell said. While Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, has for months been calling for the party to adopt the policy, or seek a second referendum, Corbyn has so-far refused to commit. ...

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• 7 July

  Hong Kong protesters take message to mainlanders

  

  Bloomberg Thousands of demonstrators chanting slogans marched through one of Hong Kong’s busiest tourist districts, the latest demonstration in weeks of mass protests triggered by a proposed law that would allow extraditions of criminals to mainland China for the first time. The marchers walked through the pedestrian-heavy Tsim Sha Tsui area as they headed towards the city’s new high-speed rail ...

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• 7 July

  Europe has sharp trade message for Trump

  

  The trade deal between the European Union and four of Latin America’s biggest economies is a sharp riposte to both US President Donald Trump and Britain’s Brexiters. The agreement, reached after 20 years of negotiations, will end tariffs on 93 percent of Mercosur’s exports to the EU over time, with the rest getting “preferential treatment.” European companies — including those ...

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• 7 July

  Big tech firms have dug a moat

  

  As US anti-monopoly authorities weigh possible investigations into America’s technology superpowers, there is one advantage the government can’t touch: the size, scale and might of the tech giants’ computer networks, logistics machines and other infrastructure. This week, Bloomberg News wrote about the irony of the last decade of flourishing technology startups. Many of the upstarts might not exist without the ...

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• 7 July

  Why venture capitalists like expensive groceries

  Nobody likes a big grocery bill. Unless you’re a venture capitalist, of course. With the cost of produce skyrocketing in China, hot money is flooding towards fresh-food operators. Yonghui Superstores Co., a $14 billion firm that counts Tencent Holdings Ltd. as a strategic investor, now trades above 40 times 2019 earnings. Shares of Jiajiayue Group Co., a smaller supermarket chain, ...

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• 7 July

  Italy faces more than 40-bn euro reckoning

  Italy’s populist leaders have spent the best part of a year looking for the outside forces who were driving up the country’s cost of issuing public debt. The answer, it turns out, was closer to home. This week the yield on Italy’s 10-year bonds fell below 2 percent, while the interest on two-year debt turned negative. The yield spread with ...

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• 7 July

  How can presidential candidates be so silly?

  

  If California Sen. Kamala Harris is elected president in 2020 and reelected in 2024, by the time she leaves office 114 months from now she might have a coherent answer to the question of whether Americans should be forbidden to have what 217 million of them currently have: private health insurance. Her 22 weeks of contradictory statements, and her Trumpian ...

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• 7 July

  Why bad news for China might be good news for Australia

  

  Bad news in China might just be good news for Australia. That may sound counterintuitive, given the two economies are so closely intertwined. But Beijing’s efforts to stimulate its slackening economy are boosting the price of iron ore, among Australia’s biggest exports. Steel mills in China are humming. Tax cuts and steps to boost consumption stand to shore up Australia ...

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• 7 July

  Too many companies drain value from economy

  

  Defenders of free markets have always portrayed them as rife with healthy competition. Striving to outdo each other in providing high-quality products to consumers at ever-lower prices, according to this narrative, companies only profit from the hard work they do and the risks they take. This means that corporate profits should grow roughly at the rate of the economy as ...

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